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Meditations on Immortality, Part 3: Swordsmanship and Perfection
Welcome back to this article series on perfection and immortality! In Part 2, I talked a lot about fractals, repeating, self-similar patterns that have a complex relationship with perspective and infinity. I noted that the more one delves into fractals, the more often one encounters paradoxes, such as the Coastline Paradox. As you might remember
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 2: Fractals and Infinity
In Part 1, I talked about the overlapping ideas of eternity, perfection, and immortality and the seeming paradox of making something perfect: “…making perfection a reality seems to evoke the mathematical concept of the asymptote— ‘a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it.’ One can approach perfection, but the closer
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection
Immortality is a recurring thing in the fantasy genre—liches, elves, gods, and so on. I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on immortality, both in terms of fiction and more generally. It’s a fascinating topic, because it naturally intersects with so many other things—mathematics, metaphysics, and the limits of the human body and
